Using Fire Eagle to store your current location

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

Not that you’d really notice, but I’ve updated the code to show my current location on the map on this blog to use Fire Eagle to store my current location.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Fire Eagle is a service provided by Yahoo! which lets you store your current location, and then allow different applications read or write access that location at an accuracy level that you control.

This is a simple service which is actually really cool, and there are already multiple applications on different platforms (web, client and mobile) which allow you to read and/or update your location dynamically. So if you really want to – and I do! – you can track and expose your location however you want.

The full developer details are at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/developer (you need a Yahoo! account to access this) so I won’t explain too many of the low-level details here. However here’s a few things to note if you want to investigate yourself:

1. Fire Eagle uses OAuth for securing access to their API, which means:

• First get the application token by registering your application at Fire Eagle
• Using the application token you get a request token for an individual user, from which a URL is created to send the user to Fire Eagle to both confirm access permissions to their location for your application, and at the level of accuracy the application may show
• Once the user has confirmed permission, your application gets a user-specific token which it should store and use to access the Fire Eagle API to get that user’s location

2. There are various libraries available for both OAuth and Fire Eagle access:

• I used the C# Fire Eagle library at Google Code
• However there are a couple of bugs in the library that I had to fix:
  • The response can’t be serialised properly because the Error object uses IDictionary which can’t be serialised
  • A couple of the values in the location hierarchy - “exact” and “region” weren’t available
• Also, the library didn’t expose the latitude and longitude of the locations returned – the main thing I was interested in so I could display the position on my Virtual Earth map!
• Update (8th Dec 2008) I’ve checked in fixes for both issues and the library extensions I made to the code repository at http://code.google.com/p/fireeaglenet/ If you find any problems, let me know and I’ll take a look ASAP.

Once all of the access token details have been obtained and stored in my web.config file (I know, not the most secure practice and not one I’d use on a real production site), then using the C# library it’s very easy to get my location with a few lines of code:

  Token userToken = new Token(appSettings["fireeagle_usertoken"], appSettings["fireeagle_usersecret"]);
  FireEagle fireEagle = new FireEagle(appSettings["fireeagle_consumertoken"], appSettings["fireeagle_consumersecret"], userToken);
  User fireEagleUser = fireEagle.User();
  Location bestLocation = fireEagleUser.LocationHierarchy.BestGuess;

I can then use that Location object (after my extension to the library) to get the latitude and longitude to drive my JavaScript implementation of Virtual Earth shown in an earlier post.

As an aside – which I may come back to in a future post – I wanted to protect some of the pages I built (the ones where I expose my Fire Eagle token details). To do this I used Windows Live ID using code from the Web Authentication SDK – see http://dev.live.com/liveid/ for details.

This was almost trivially easy, and having banged my head against earlier Passport implementations, this was a pleasure to use (if that’s not overstating things!). Kudos to the Live ID team, and if you’ve been put off using WLID after being scarred by previous attempts with Passport, I definitely recommend taking another look.

Super-fast MSDN

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

I got this tip in the pub on Friday from my friend Bobby who works on the MSDN team. He told me he’d worked on implementing a low bandwidth version of the site, which is simpler and much, much faster than usual view.

I’d never heard of this, but a quick Live Search found a few relevant blog posts, including an excellent post explaining this feature and quite a bit more on John Galloway's blog.

I’d definitely recommend checking out that article, but the key point is simply add “(loband)” before the “.aspx” in any MSDN library URL e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

You can also set a cookie that can persist this view for future calls to MSDN without having to insert the (loband) part.

I’m sure many people who spend a lot of time in the MSDN libraries (including myself) will definitely find this feature very useful. This should definitely be publicised more widely!

Showing my current location using Virtual Earth

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

As I’m often switching location between my home in the UK and working out in Redmond, I’ve been thinking for a while about how best to easily let people know where I am. As you can hopefully see, I’ve added a map to every page on this blog and I thought that maybe people might be interested how I did this, as I learnt a few things on the way that were reasonably interesting.

The first challenge was to figure out the best way around the limitations of adding a map to the blog page. Although the Community Server software that this site runs on is pretty flexible, you can only add elements to every page in various sections – in my case in the News section. Luckily there don’t appear to be any restrictions on the actual HTML you can add, so I was left with a choice of options.

My first thought was to add an <IFRAME… /> section that would call out to a page on my own server that would use Windows Live Maps to display where I am by adding a pushpin at the appropriate location. However this didn’t really work very well, as the map code didn’t really like being in an IFrame and the flow of the page around the map was broken.

Therefore the solution I hit on was to add the following code:

<h3>LIVE LOCATION</h3>
<div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:150px; height:200px;"></div>
<script type<="text/javascript" src="http://www.metanetsolutions.co.uk/mapscript.aspx?mapElement=myMap" defer="true"></script>

The ‘myMap’ element is the div where the map will be placed by the JavaScript that I create on my server. Note that I am passing the name of this element into my script so I can use it.

Interesting point to note is adding the defer=true on to the script call. Without it, I was occasionally hitting a known issue in Internet Explorer due to a bug in the IE parser :-(

The ASPX page that generates the JavaScript is shown below. I won’t show the pretty simple code behind just yet, as I’m hoping to add more functionality to this soon before I share the code. However in this initial version it just creates a “LocationEntry” object from an XML file held on the server, and then uses this object to set various parts of the script.

The interesting things of note in the JavaScript are:

• Note the excellent "delayed loading of the map code" that was written by Soul Solutionsthat I used here. This:
  • Sets an animated GIF as the background to the map div while the code is loading
  • Dynamically adds the Virtual Earth required JavaScript files to the head element of the page
  • Sets a callback to the function to setup the map once the VE API scripts have loaded
• The onscriptload callback function removes the dashboard and scalebar to make the map cleaner, sets the zoom level – defaults to 10 but can be overwritten by setting a zoom=n on the query parameters to the page request, and then simply adds a pushpin at the location set by the LocationEntry in the code behind

Hopefully this is pretty self-explanatory – see http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/ for more details about the Virtual Earth API.

Here’s the ASPX/JavaScript code:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="MapScript.aspx.cs" Inherits="DefaultPage" %>
var mapElementName = '<%= this.MapElementName %>';
var mapControlVersion = '6.2';

// Dynamic loading script from http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm
var loaded = false;
var map = null;

function onscriptload()
{
    // Get rid of our load animation
    document.getElementById(mapElementName).style.background = "";

    var locationLatLong = new VELatLong(<%= this.CurrentLocation.Latitude %>, <%= this.CurrentLocation.Longitude %>);
    map = new VEMap(mapElementName);
    map.LoadMap(locationLatLong, 1, VEMapStyle.Road, true, VEMapMode.Mode2D, false, 0);
    map.HideDashboard();
    map.HideScalebar();
    map.SetZoomLevel(<%= this.MapZoomLevel %>);

    AddLocationPushpin(locationLatLong);
}

function loadVEAPI()
{
    if (!loaded)
    {
      loaded = true;

      // Set a nice animated gif to show the map is loading
      document.getElementById(mapElementName).style.background = "url(images/ajax-loader.gif) center center no-repeat";
      
      if (!(window.attachEvent))
      {
        appendJS("http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v" + mapControlVersion + "/js/atlascompat.js");
      }

      appendJS("http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v="+ mapControlVersion + "&onScriptLoad=onscriptload");
    }
}

function appendJS(filename)
{
    var fileref = document.createElement('script');
    fileref.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
    fileref.setAttribute("src", filename);
    document.getElementsByTagName("head"[0].appendChild(fileref);
}

function AddLocationPushpin(myLocation)
{
    map.SetCenter(myLocation);

    var myPushpin = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Pushpin, myLocation);

    myPushpin.SetTitle("<%= this.CurrentLocation.Title %>");

    var description = "<p><%= this.CurrentLocation.Description %></p>";
    description += "<p><%= this.CurrentLocation.UpdateTime.ToString("u<") %></p>";
    myPushpin.SetDescription(description);

    map.AddShape(myPushpin);
}

// Start the loading
loadVEAPI();

Future plans (which I suspect are overly ambitious!) for this application involve:

• A JavaScript and VE enabled form to easily update my location
• Mesh-enabling the application
• Hooking up my GPS so I can automatically update my location when I’m on the move
• Possibly hooking everything up to FireEagle

ASP.Net Compilation Tool - do you want to allow updates without redeploying?

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

We found an interesting issue today regarding our use of pre-compiled ASP.Net websites that I thought I would share, as we learnt something that we didn’t know before.

In our particular setup (for reasons too complicated to go into here), we have an ASP.Net website that:

1. We want to pre-compile before deploying to the live servers for the usual reasons of performance (no delay on first hit) and security (source code not hosted on the servers)
2. Before starting the web application, we automatically generate its web.config file
3. By default we want to disable view state in all the pages by adding a <pages enableViewState=”false” /> node in the generated web.config

Our issue was that even though the generated web.config file had the correct setting in it, the view state wasn’t being disabled. This had us confused for quite a while.

It turns out that the default setting when a website is compiled by the ASP.Net compiler doesn’t allow subsequent updates to the site.

In our particular case, this meant the compiled pages were using the (default) value in our non-existent web.config at compile time, not the one actually on the server at runtime.

Once we realised that, the solution was easy: simply add a –u parameter to the compiler flags which meant:

-u specifies that the Aspnet_compiler.exe should create a precompiled application that allows subsequent updates of contents such as .aspx pages.

If this option is omitted, the resulting application contains only compiled files and cannot be updated on the deployment server. You can update the application only by changing the source markup files and recompiling.

(Stolen from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229863(VS.80).aspx from where you can see all the available compiler parameters)

I guess a more common scenario is that you want to hot fix your web.config file – perhaps your database connection strings need changing immediately – but unless you’ve compiled with the –u flag, you’ll have to do a full build and redeployment.

Using a parameter in a SELECT TOP statement in SQL

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

As usual, this may well be common knowledge but I found this useful.

In a stored procedure we were passing in a parameter (say @maxRows) which we wanted to use to dynamically limit the number of rows returned by the query.

For ages we couldn't find a way to do this without building up the SQL in a string using the parameter and then executing it e.g. something horrible like 'SELECT TOP ' + CAST(@MaxRows AS varchar(10)) + '...'

Now it turns out you are supposed to put the value used by the TOP in brackets anyway - see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189463.aspx - so putting the parameter in brackets e.g. SELECT TOP (@MaxRows) ... is not only correct but gets around the horrible cast.